Portland's Hand2Mouth on Undine and Creating New Work in the Northwest

Faith Helma in Hand2Mouth Theatre's "Undine," photo by Tim Summers.

"What I've always loved about his telling of it was that it was very ambiguous," said Faith Helma of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's 1811 fairy tale novella Undine. "Like, 'The Little Mermaid,' you read the original version of it, it's a pretty dark story. But this one was even more so. All of the characters are very ambiguous, and none of the characters are all bad or all good. Even the most creepy, scary character, you can kind of see his point of view. He's not a villain. And then there's the spirit world, which is frightening but also beautiful. And she's presented as this character you can identify with, but who's not to be trusted. There's something a little unsettling about it. That was my experience of reading the story—you can't really decide if you're on her side."

This was last Saturday, and I was sitting in Fresh Pot Cafe in Portland, Oregon's Mississippi district, with Helma and her husband Jonathan Walters. The two are long-time members of Portland's well respected experimental theatre company Hand2Mouth, which Walters founded in 2000. This Friday and Saturday, Jan. 29 and 30, they're bringing Helma's first solo work, Undine, back to Seattle, where it debuted in 2008 as part of the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards. The performances are at Theatre off Jackson, in a co-presentation with Seattle's Satori Group (tickets $10-$12), with a panel discussion about creating new work in the Northwest after each performance, moderated by The Stranger's Brendan Kiley.

While nominally inspired by Fouqué's novella, elements of which Helma admits trying to incorporate into Hand2Mouth's previous shows to little or no success, the piece is not so much an adaptation of the narrative. "I'm obsessed with the fairy tale, so I wind up talking about that, but I feel like it leaves this image in people's minds of, 'Okay, solo performance, fairy tale...'" She trailed off, eyes rolling and chuckling at the image that description must put in people's minds.

"I mean, if you didn't know it was based on a fairy tale, I don't know what you'd think," she said.

Far from being a series of monologues or characters, what Helma and her collaborators have done is to create a song cycle, which she performs live (with potentially some pre-recordings), using a pair of digital looping effects pedals. Thematically, the story of Undine, a water spirit who marries a knight in order to get a soul, has been processed into a sort of meta-narrative by Helma, who sees parallels between Fouqué's version and her own experience as a performer.

"My experience reading that fairy tale when I was younger was that there's this character that you can identify with, and are kind of scared to identify with" at the same time, she explained. "You know, I don't know if I want to identify with her. And that feeling got linked in me with performing over the last ten years, where you're watching someone and you're not sure if they're in control."

While Undine is the first solo work by a company member (otherwise Hand2Mouth operates as a collaborative ensemble), in this aspect it links back strongly to the company's other work.

Faith Helma from "Undine." Photo by Tim Summers

"When I'm directing, I often think of the experiential," Walters explained. "Like, in the new show [Hand2Mouth's ensemble piece, Everyone Who Looks Like You, which debuted a few months ago in Portland, and was performed at New York's LaMama Experimental Theatre Club just a couple weeks ago], we wanted to have one of the culminating moments be a family fight. But I kept saying that I want it to be not like you're watching a family fight, but that you're in the middle of the worst family fight, and your stomach's in your gut and you're saying, 'I need to get the fuck out the door,' but there's no leaving. So the challenge was, can we stage a family fight that the audience is inside of. So with this [Undine], I think that was the challenge—when you hear about this character that appears that has the power to control the forces of nature, and it's truly frightening, and a presence enters the room that's larger than the room, and it's outside the walls and the room is shaking... Could we create that effect for the audience? Could we actually make them frightened? Could we frighten them?"

"We've worked with a number of sound designers over the course of the production," he continued, "and the person we started the process with, his name was John Berendzen, and he was the sound artist and brilliant mind behind Liminal Performance Group. And so we worked with him to create this effect in the audience's mind that there's this personality, which is out of touch with humanity, but at the same time is subtly and not-so-subtly conjuring these other characters. And I always look forward to the show, because from the moment you enter it, it sort of kicks you into an alternate sound world, and then you journey through that, and all these things appear."

He paused. "I still remember our company being shocked the first time they saw it, because they only knew the source material, and they experience this, at times, incredibly loud, roaring, rocking, kind of earth-shatteringly loud thing emanating from this small woman on stage who becomes all these different sonic elements."

Undine also represents a turning point in Hand2Mouth's history. When the company started out in 2000, there were several other companies in Portland making work in a similar, generative process—performance pieces, in other words, rather than simple performed texts, in which the movement, setting, even the performers are integral to the work. But today, Hand2Mouth is essentially the only company left, and has even moved on to playing a more active role in trying to support contemporary performance in the city, even producing their own festival, Risk/Reward, every summer.

So when Helma decided a few years ago to pursue her own solo performance work, outside the company's otherwise collaborative process, there was a fear that the members moving in different directions on their own endangered the company's long-term stability.

"I'd started the company after I'd been in Poland for a year, working with this pretty famous theatre company, Teatr Biuro Podróży," said Jonathan Walters. "They've come to America a few times. They make these huge spectacles, usually based on classical themes. Their most recent piece is Macbeth—it's toured all over the world but it hasn't come here. But the year I was there, they had some strong voices in the company, who wanted to have their own voice, make their own work. For ten years they'd labored together, but they'd always made this greater vision. And the artistic director was really threatened by that, and clamped down on it and created this schism in the company and created a split. Some of their founding members all broke the year that I was there. He was basically saying, 'Choose one or the other.' And so they said, 'Okay, we choose the other.'"

Faith Helma in "Undine." Photo by Tim Summers.

So the company's ability to support Helma with Undine (their site even credits it as a Hand2Mouth production), signaled that they had reached a point where they could continue to operate as a group, while giving members room to continue developing as individual artists.

"It's just sort of this dream of ours, that our small company in its poor way can be this place where lots of voices can be heard and also can be supported," Walters said. "And that our company members can blow off steam with this idea you've been holding for six years, instead of that turning to frustration."

That tradition continues this year, when a second company member—Erin Leddy—will debut a solo work, again at On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival. That's the third show by Hand2Mouth or their company's members to appear there since 2007, when the company brought a shorter version of the ensemble piece Repeat After Me to NWNW.

"When we went up to Northwest New Works, it just struck us right away that there just seemed to be more" support for creating new work in Seattle, said Walters, "And we came back feeling like we wanted to do what we could to foster that sense here."

The result of their efforts has been not only the Risk/Reward Festival, but attempts to develop closer collaboration between performance groups in Portland. "We've been trying really hard to make a network for people who are here, like dance companies," Helma said. "And I feel like a lot times, that's who we've related to most here—dance companies." As a model, Walters mentioned Vancouver's SeeSeven program, in which eleven groups banded together to sell cross-company subscriptions. And then last year, several members of the Satori Group ventured down to Portland to see Hand2Mouth's work, as well as to discuss creating new performance in the Northwest.

One of the ideas that kept coming up was a "fifth week" of a run. Essentially the idea is that when a company like Satori or Hand2Mouth debuts a work, it runs for four weeks. But generative companies also intend to take shows on tour. Undine showed at Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysterical Incubator in NYC over the summer on a double-bill with Seattle's Helsinki Syndrome, and the company took Everyone Who Looks Like You back to New York for the insanity of January's performance scene, in which several festivals—including Under the Radar—take place opposite the Association of Performing Arts Presenters' annual conference, giving the various companies a shot of being seen by producers from all over the world and even more opportunities for touring.

The idea of the "fifth week," then, is to develop a smaller touring circuit that doesn't require waiting around, during which time actors find other jobs, adding more rehearsal time to bring new people in. Immediately after a show closed in Portland, it could move to Seattle for a limited run, and vice-versa. This weekend's production of Undine sponsored by Satori Group is the first attempt at that (with the caveat that Undine's initial run was in '08-'09).

Overall, it's an attempt by artists to create an infrastructure for themselves where one comprised of actual presenters and producers doesn't yet exist. Hence the post-show discussion, moderated by Kiley and featuring, among others, Seattle playwright Paul Mullin, who's been writing a series of strategizing essays on how to improve conditions in Seattle for creating new work.